Riot's Legacy of Distrust Quietly Stalks a Soviet City

By BILL KELLER, Special to the New York Times

Published: August 31, 1988

SUMGAIT, U.S.S.R., Aug. 28—
It is six months since the weekend of horror when Albert M. Mamedov called his Armenian neighbors to gather the children and come quickly because a mob was going door to door, hunting for Armenians.

Six months since Iskui Isanyan lay giving birth to her son and listening to the sound of rioters and troops in the streets. Six months since Tale Ismailov, drunk from a birthday party, picked up an iron rod and waded into the murderous crowd to finish off an Armenian carpenter who had been dragged from his car on Peace Street.

It is six months since this quiet, ethnically mixed industrial city in eastern Azerbaijan, where no one seemed to care all that much about the dispute between the neighboring Armenian and Azerbaijani republics over control of a region called Nagorno-Karabakh, erupted in a pogrom. An Air of Menace

The ''February events,'' as the anti-Armenian riots are delicately called here, killed 32 people and lent an air of menace to an ethnic crisis that has not completely abated.

This correspondent was the first Western reporter allowed to visit Sumgait since the Soviet Government imposed travel restrictions in the region in February.

The city is peaceful now, but not the same.

The 26 Armenians and 6 Azerbaijanis who died in the spasm of violence are long buried. The ransacked apartments have been repaired, the cars and buses set afire by rioters towed away. The troops called in to restore order were sent home by early April. Trials and an Exodus

The trials of the young Azerbaijanis arrested in the riots are reported regularly in Sumgait's Russian- and Azerbaijani-language newspapers. Nine young men have been sentenced - Tale Ismailov was the first, receiving 15 years for murder - and 33 more are on trial, with another 52 still under investigation.

A team supervised by the federal prosecutor continues an investigation that has mostly, but not entirely, cleared up the mystery of how such a thing could happen in a city that prided itself on its ethnic harmony.

The riots caused an exodus that is still continuing, here and in other Azerbaijani cities. Two thousand of Sumgait's 10,000 Armenians have left and some of those who remain are skittish.

''They were afraid,'' said Mrs. Isanyan, whose in-laws moved to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, after the riots. ''What they were afraid of, I don't know. No one came to our flat, no one attacked us. But still there was a lot of talk, and some people were afraid. They are gone, and we are still here.''

The older Armenian men who used to outnumber Azerbaijanis at the spirited backgammon game in the city park that overlooks the Caspian sea no longer come, said the men assembled there this Sunday.

''These events cost me half my Armenian friends,'' said Khilal Verdiyev, 63, a teacher at the local chemical institute. ''Some of them were frightened away. Some just feel ashamed to show their faces because they know the trouble was provoked by the Armenian side.''

It is accepted wisdom among Sumgait's Azerbaijani majority that the riots Feb. 27, 28 and 29 were deliberately contrived by Armenian extremists in order to discredit Azerbaijan in the battle for the world's sympathy.

The chief prosecutor for the Azerbaijani republic, Ilyas A. Ismailov, who is not known to be related to Tale Ismailov, said in an interview that there is no evidence to support this conclusion. But around the backgammon table the Azerbaijani elders have decided the matter.

''We are ready to be friends,'' said Mr. Verdiyev. ''We have always been friends. But the friendship is not the same as it was.''

Meanwhile, city officials said 3,500 Azerbaijani refugees have moved into Sumgait from villages in Armenia, part of a larger wave fleeing what they say is continuing persecution at the hands of Armenian nationalists.

One refugee from the Masis region of Armenia, who insisted on anonymity to protect relatives she left behind, said that since the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh became heated in February, Armenians have burned the houses of Azerbaijani villagers, refused to sell them food, and prevented them from selling their vegetables at local bazaars in an attempt to drive them back to Azerbaijan. 'A Lot of Sumgaits'

''You see, there are a lot of Sumgaits,'' said Zulfi S. Gadzhiyev, the Communist Party leader in Sumgait since March 16. ''Every Azerbaijani region of Armenia is a little Sumgait.''

Sumgait is a young city of 265,000 people, a city of steel and petrochemical factories, built in 1949 by specialists recruited from Azerbaijan, Armenia, Siberia and many other parts of the Soviet Union. It is a half-hour drive from Baku, a cosmopolitan petroleum center that is the capital of Azerbaijan.

Mixed marriages are common in Sumgait, mixed neighborhoods the rule. Although Azerbaijanis are predominantly Moslem and Armenians mainly Orthodox Christian, there are no mosques or churches in the city, no ethnic clubs or schools. The policy is assimilation and coexistence.

When the Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave in western Azerbaijan, demanded early this year to be joined with Armenia, their ethnic kin in Armenia, Moscow and elsewhere took to the streets in sympathy.

Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, still in a tense recovery from months of strikes and civil disobedience, remain off limits to Western reporters.

In Sumgait and Baku, according to local Armenians, the cause aroused little excitement except an occasional loud argument between neighbors.

Even now, everyone in Sumgait seems to know first-hand of an Azerbaijani who, like Mr. Mamedov, sheltered Armenian neighbors during the troubles. Newcomers in Shantytowns